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I am having trouble rescueing data from potentially dying hard drive (laptop Windows 7, not booting) previous attempts have resulted in the copied files substantially exceeding their original file sizes, so that not all files fitted onto the external drives. could the reason be that the external drive needs to be partitioned?

or is it a problem that I deleted the software pre-installed on the external drives?

sorry for the probable naivety of my questions, but I'm not really a techie and with virtually no experience regarding linux.

Ta very much for any constructive hints & suggestions

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To answer your question, the problem doesn't have anything to do with the external hard drive. You said it yourself, your laptop's HDD is dying, so maybe the files you're trying to copy off of it are located in bad sectors of the HDD which might be the reason for the substantial increase in their file sizes.

Deleting the software that was already on the new HDD has nothing to do with this. Your external HDD was most probably pre-formatted using the NTFS file system. Partitioning the HDD will have absolutely no effect if the files you're trying to copy from your notebook's HDD are corrupt.

What you could do is try recovering data from your laptop's HDD using file recovery software such as Recuva, TestDisk or Stellar Phoenix.

You might also want to check the S.M.A.R.T. information of your laptop's HDD to see how bad the situation is. Use CrystalDiskInfo for this purpose.

You'll have to connect your laptop's HDD to a computer running CrystalDiskInfo to read the S.M.A.R.T. information. You could use a cheap 2.5-Inch USB 2 HDD enclosure like this one.

Alternatively, you could use a boot disk like BootMed to read the S.M.A.R.T. data

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  • Dear Vinayak,thank you for your reply and suggestions.
    – trigby
    Commented May 31, 2014 at 14:37
  • Dear Vinayak,thank you for your reply and suggestions. What puzzled me about the external drive was that after deleting the software there was still no more space on the disk than before, behaviour I know from deleting files on external devices used with Macs, but have not come across in PCs, Idon't think. On a Mac I'd have emptied the bin but running Linux I am at a loss at what to do. Regarding the more important issue of data recovery: I am unfamiliar with all of the programs you mentioned, ddrescue is supposed to save the uninflicted chunks first and then return to damaged blocks...
    – trigby
    Commented May 31, 2014 at 14:56
  • ...handling the hdd with kid gloves, more or less.
    – trigby
    Commented May 31, 2014 at 14:58
  • sorry, I keep getting interrupted. Running the knoppix live cd I entered smartctl -a /dev/sda at the root prompt
    – trigby
    Commented May 31, 2014 at 17:50
  • sorry, I keep getting interrupted. Running the knoppix live cd I entered smartctl -a /dev/sda at the root prompt; result: the internal drive is a goner - about to snuff it shortly. I checked a few files obtained from copying with PCMan on the two external drives and they seem ok, but I have not got a clue how many of my files actually made it across and I doubt I will be able to get the entire image and all my software back across onto a new internal drive for a complete system restore. Will try and report the outcome. Thanks again
    – trigby
    Commented May 31, 2014 at 17:58

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